Covid Risk Calculator

Inspiration

Wanting to get out and meet our friends but not knowing whether we would be endangering our families and county, we wished for a simple way to figure out how much risk we were susceptible to based on where we went, what we did there, and how our county had been fairing against COVID. With this program we wished to create an effective way to figure out whether meeting our friends or going out was a smart thing to do.

What it does

Our risk calculator determines the riskiness of going outside based on county case data from the past week and the intended actions of the user.

How I built it

We gathered data from the New York Times covid tracking project by web scraping the csv files on their GitHub. By doing this we were able to obtain case data and mask usage information for all the counties in the U.S. Then, we used a csv file from the Census Bureau for county population information. We applied an SIR model to this data to calculate the reproduction ratio of Covid in specific counties. We then scaled this ratio with factors such as mask usage and what the user intended on doing outside. This new value was then compared to certain thresholds to determine the risk level in a readable form for the user.

Challenges I ran into

As we used data from multiple sources, getting the data to match up and sync became an irritating problem as we made the program more complex. For example the names of the counties would not always match up in the csv files, even though the data represented the same county. We were also hoping to make a website, but the framework we used, flask, did not meet the requirements we needed.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We were able to interpret and utilize data from extremely long CSV files in a matter of a few hours. We were also able to take in multiple factors to determine the risk rate/ percentage, making it more accurate as we progressed. Finally, we overcame all of our problems by finding a more effective means or problem-solving.

What I learned

As a team, we have learnt how to create a simple gui using tkinter and how to combine python and html code using flask. We researched the SIR model to find the equations we needed for our risk calculation. We have also learnt a lot about the coding process because whenever we ran our program, we were presented with a plethora of problems which we had to overcome.

What's next for Covid Risk Calculator

We hope to create a website and mobile app so people can use our program on the fly. We also wish to work on the GUI to make it more pleasing to the eye.

Built With

• censusbureau
• new-york-times
• python
• tkinter